Cultural Studies Interdisciplinary Graduate Program: Theses

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/1974/6146

Browse

Now showing 1 - 5 of 169

Cyber-Social Interaction: Ghanaian Popular Dance in the "Shifting Virtual Cypher" - Instagram
(2024-07-17) Mattson, Benedictus; Cultural Studies; Walker, Margaret
Azonto dance, an expressive popular dance originating in Accra-Ghana in the early 2000s has achieved global recognition particularly due to its constant presence on social media. Due to Ghanaian youths’ neglect and marginalization and the constant control of mainstream media by the governmental and social elites, social media, and in particular, Instagram, has become an alternative platform for young people to explore to promote their crafts. I argue that this shift from performing Azonto dance in pubs, street corners, and other in-person cypher grounds to disseminating through virtual spaces has engendered profound choreographic transformations to the dance as well as complicated the economic conditions of deprived young Azonto dancers. This interdisciplinary research thus is a unique attempt to investigate these transformations that have occurred between 2017 to 2023, a phenomenon I explore through the productive conversations between critical globalization theory, mediatization and practice theory. My research methodology is a combination of digital ethnography and in-person participation, observations, and interviews, whilst my decade long experience in performing and teaching Azonto dance has informed my analysis of data. One of the major findings of my dissertation is how the activities of Azonto dancers on Instagram have facilitated the transformation of the Azonto dance cypher. I hence theorize the “Shifting Virtual Cypher” as way of conceptualizing how the Azonto dance cypher has changed over time. I conclude that although Azonto has gained worldwide recognition and may have enhanced youths’ economic conditions, it is crucial to be aware of the larger impact of the adverse effects of this extreme popularity.
The Tattoo Renaissance: Popular Narratives and Neglected Stories of Body Ink’s History in American Culture
(2024-05-23) Fabiani, Christina; Cultural Studies; Brison, Jeff; Haidarali, Laila
This dissertation examines the American tattoo renaissance from the late 1960s through the 1980s, an era in which a subcultural movement worked to elevate body ink from its stigmatized status in American culture to an appreciated and mainstream position as a fine art. I explore this period as a cultural tipping point in body ink’s American history that was (and is) presented as a white liberal movement that redefined the practice to suit the middle-class palate. Tattoos became commodified as popular fashion items that symbolized the wearer’s individuality, bodily autonomy, and open-mindedness. Upon deeper investigation, however, I show that this ‘official’ and dominative narrative exists and persists through the erasure of marginalized individuals and social groups from the practice’s cultural production and hegemonic memory. I interpret an extensive source base through an intersectional lens grounded in analytical frameworks of subculture theory, cultural economies, and critical race, and I uncover the complex subcultural boundaries that governed the tattoo trade and in fact reinforced dominant American ideals of patriarchal heteronormativity, racial superiority, and white respectability. Firstly, I explore how and why the renaissance-era tattoo community’s aesthetic and behavioural standards were deliberately produced and policed to legitimize the trade in the public eye. My research reveals that the mechanisms involved in the popularization of body ink in America mirrored the sociopolitical climate at the time. Secondly, my research foregrounds, and thus reverses the silences around, individuals and social groups largely omitted from the trade’s cultural production and popular history. I showcase how these people and communities embraced, rejected, and/or transformed (often simultaneously) the subcultural standards that directed the mainstream body ink industry in ways that disrupt the hegemonic memory of this critical period in the trade’s history. My research not only complicates popular narratives of body ink advocates and their legitimizing efforts during the trade’s renaissance period but also highlights the lived realities of individuals and social groups who existed on the margins of mainstream tattoo culture, positions that mirrored their status within American society at large.
The fictions of poverty: Food insecurity and children’s literature
(2024-05-14) Day, Dian; Cultural Studies; Power, Elaine
In this dissertation I examine the ways in which ideas about poverty and poverty-related food insecurity circulate within children's middle grade fiction. Through a variety of approaches, I examine how this literature, as a literature of and for the powerless, creates and supports the socioeconomic and political status quo. I begin by reviewing the existing secondary literature on poverty in children's books before turning to a study of the way food and food insecurity more specifically make an appearance in middle school literature. I explore the ways three common tropes operate with particular strength within stories about food insecurity: that of gender (especially mothering); the association of poverty with ignorance; and the taken-for-granted superiority of middle-class values and knowledge. Overall, these books’ singular focus on individual solutions to overcoming food insecurity renders invisible both the pervasiveness of systemic barriers and the possibilities of collective action to counter inequities. Looking to move beyond a mere recognition and critique of the issues present in extant texts I create a fiction of my own, in an arts-based research project, that strives to address the most taken-for-granted but nonetheless problematic of these stereotypes; the graphic novel script for Stuffing the Bus tells the story of two young protagonists, one of whom is food insecure, who explore the difficult issue of food insecurity without easy answers or individualistic solutions—but I also remain focused, ultimately, on telling a good story. In a subsequent section, I explore the writing process and my writerly decisions in depth as I worked to create a story that provides a critical counterpoint to entrenched economic inequities. I conclude that individually- and charity-focused solutions to food insecurity only serve to support their perpetuation, and that real change towards fewer hungry and food insecure children (and adults) will come only through community-supported efforts toward systemic change. I hope that creating new fictions will contribute to that work.
Amazonification: A Warehouse Worker’s Manifesto
(2024-03-19) Ali, Hiba; Cultural Studies; Pelstring, Emily; Zaiontz, Keren
This research-creation dissertation portfolio draws upon strategies of art-activism and uses a manifesto format to critique and subvert the exploitative labour practices of the Amazon corporation. Linked to each portfolio chapter is a custom-made, online 3D art project, or digital thinking object, in the shape of a globe that was created using the modelling platform SketchFab. Located on the Amazon “globe,” signifying the global nature of Amazon’s impact, are five different symbolic objects that function as entry points to the five manifesto essays of this dissertation, which include references and links to documentation of my anti-Amazon art practice. The introduction, “Amazonification: A Warehouse Worker’s Manifesto,” is represented through a palm tree, whose many leaves denote a network where shipping infrastructure is repurposed into sites for community-oriented acts of care. Chapter one, “Define Amazon” is symbolized by Danbo, Amazon’s “adorable” cardboard mascot whose “cuteness” obscures the violence of Amazon’s labour practices. In chapter two, “Seeing Orange,” symbolized through an orange ball, I make connections between Amazon’s orange mascot, Peccy, and prison jumpsuits, carcerality, and labour exploitation, and reclaim the colour as a colour of healing by invoking Orange Shirt Day in Canada, Buddhist robes, marigolds, and mehndi. In the third art manifesto chapter, “Peccy: the Fiction of a ‘Happy’ Worker,” I position the mascot’s eyes as the corporation’s surveillance infrastructure, and the mascot’s (non-gendered and non-raced) “blob” body as the dehumanization of Amazon’s predominantly racialized workers’ bodies. In the final manifesto essay, “Ongoing Struggle: Unionizing Environments in Chicago, Bessemer, and Minneapolis” the Amazon Workers’ International logo symbolizes the labour activism of Chicago’s DCH1, Bessemer’s BHM1, and Minneapolis’ MSP1 warehouse workers’ challenges for unionization between 2018 to 2021, activities crucial to resisting labour exploitation and building community. This dissertation does not just critique Amazon; it prompts viewers to begin to envision a different future. By foregrounding labour unions and the experiences of poor, working-class, Black and brown Amazon warehouse workers, I call for the fostering of a compassionate “network of care.” This portfolio dissertation is a call to hold a multiplicity of pathways toward this future self-determined by the people whose labour Amazon exploits: pathways that range from advocating for better workplace conditions, to shrinking the corporation, to divesting, to dismantling and abolishing the corporation.
From Unsettling to UN/making: One Settler’s Critical Methodology for Disrupting Anthropocenic Perspectives and Gestures Towards Land within the Visual Arts
(2024-03-19) Price, Jill Angela; Cultural Studies; Rogalsky, Matt
Hyper-sensitive to my settler history amidst a material culture that remains complicit in the ecological destruction of Land as a multi-species being, From Unsettling to UN/making is an interdisciplinary research-creation PhD that works at the intersections of art, ecology, ethics, and aesthetics to recognize how today’s global industrial modes of production, consumption, dissemination, and discard are neo-colonial forms of ecological, and therefore cultural genocide. Particularly unsettled by how the visual arts perpetuates anthropocenic perspectives and gestures, this thesis begins by investigating how past approaches to unmaking throughout art history often aligned with acts of destruction or self-destruction. Proposing a new interdisciplinary approach to UN/making that aligns with acts of care and repair, research and creative outputs were primarily formulated through the writing of political theorist, eco-feminist, and vital materialist Jane Bennett, as well as the writing of Unangax̂ scholar Eve Tuck, Natalie Loveless, and Natasha Myers to arrive at an assemblage actions or processes that help to prevent or redress harm. Initially driven through the deconstruction and reconfiguration of existing artworks, decolonial theory, environmental research, and new materialist thinking led to questioning the conceptual foundations of Land-based art practices and Euro-colonial aesthetics carried forward through methods, mediums, modes, and iconography of Canadian traditions of fine art. Out of a desire to understand how creatives and cultural institutions might work together to bring creative practice more into relation with the timelines, liveliness, and needs of more-than-human ontographies, my final outcomes are the result of employing different methods of dealienation, decentring, degrowth, and decolonization to arrive at an UN/making Methodology. This adaptable framework for UN/making harm is designed to help usher in more eco-ethical approaches to creative production and building community outside of accelerated, elitist, racist, and sexist capitalist systems that keep the culture industry beholden to harmful ways of thinking and doing, as well as refocus attention to Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action as they pertain to the treatment and use of Land, education, and the production, presentation, and dissemination of art.

Browse

Recent Submissions